Moammar Khadafy is so desperate that he is paying collaborators up to $800 a day to sabotage efforts to oust him, the rebels said yesterday.

Two captured loyalists confessed that they were recruited to steal rebel cars, scout their locations and create chaos with random gunshots, rebels told al-Jazeera.

In other developments yesterday:

* Libya’s former Deputy UN Ambassador Ibrahim Dabbashi told Fox News that a “friendly and reliable source in Tripoli” revealed to him that he and another ex-diplomat, Abdurrahman Shalgam, were on an “assassins’ hit list” because they denounced Khadafy.

* A chartered ship rescued about 1,000 of the 5,000 foreigners and wounded Libyans who have been trapped in Misrata. But four more civilians were killed and five more wounded by government shelling in the besieged city.

* A boat carrying three defectors — a colonel, a captain and a soldier from Khadafy’s Interior Ministry — arrived in Tunisia with 17 other people, Tunisia’s TAP news agency said.

The agency also said 11,000 Libyans have fled into Tunisia in the last week from a remote mountainous region where there are fierce battles between Khadafy’s forces and the rebels.

* Residents said more than 100 people had been killed in the last day in a rebel-held district west of Tripoli. With AP, Reuters